New Delhi: During the 2012 assembly elections, Samajwadi Party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav addressed over 300 election rallies. In the current one, he addressed just three. The low profile maintained by the patriarch in the party’s election campaign has raised questions about his relevance in the party.
The political sidelining of the 77-year-old Mulayam Singh Yadav, which began with him being replaced as national president by son and Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav following a bitter family feud in January, was accentuated in the just wrapped-up elections, with Mulayam Singh playing only a limited role in the Samajwadi Party campaign.
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Campaigning for the seven-phase state election ended on Monday and the Samajwadi Party-Congress under the leadership of Akhilesh Yadav and Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi have been mounting a determined campaign against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) with successive rallies and joint road shows.
Mulayam Singh addressed three rallies—the first two to campaign for his younger daughter-in-law Aparna Yadav and brother Shivpal Yadav and ending with a public address in the Malhani constituency of Jaunpur on Sunday.
His absence elsewhere suggests more than an error of omission. Beginning with the launch of a campaign video back in October last year which was centred around Akhilesh Yadav and his wife Dimple Yadav with no mention of Mulayam Singh, to his token presence in a handful of the party’s campaign posters, indications are that Mulayam Singh is taking a step back.
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The public sentiment in Uttar Pradesh, while acknowledging the stature of Mulayam Singh in the party, is also that Samajwadi Party is ready for a generational shift.
Samajwadi Party leaders feel that Mulayam Singh’s failure to reinvent himself and his politics in tandem with the times has led to a reduction of support for him in the party.
“When the family feud was at its peak, there was a possibility that Mulayam Singh along with Shivpal Yadav would have formed a new party. However, there are very few takers for the kind of politics Mulayam Singh stands for in the party, while Akhilesh Yadav, with his push towards development and his efforts to give the party a clean image, has grounded his position in SP,” said a senior Samajwadi Party leader who did not wish to be named. Analysts say that the sidelining of Mulayam Singh in the Samajwadi Party’s campaign will have an adverse impact on the party’s performance in the election, but the bigger takeaway of the entire episode is the political decline of the leader.
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“People are still emotionally attached to Netaji especially in Samajwadi Party bastions of Etawah and Azamgarh and even groups like ‘Mulayam ke log’ have come up in these areas. If the party loses the election, people may attribute it to Akhilesh Yadav neglecting Mulayam Singh but if Samajwadi Party comes back to power, Mulayam will never get the centre-stage. In the hour of victory, Akhilesh Yadav’s respect for his father will not get translated into Mulayam’s integration into the party,” said A.K. Verma of the Centre for the Study of Society and Politics, Kanpur.
